Directed Research
I am sorry that I haven’t got a chance to talk about my directed research lately so I just decided to do one big long post about it. I am posting this on my last night here at Moyo Hill Camp. I really cannot believe that I have lived her for just over three months now. Anyways, here’s the low down….
What’s DR?
So here at camp we are in the home stretch of the program doing directed research! The program is structured so that classes and all other academic activities are over so we all exclusively work on our projects. Our three professors determine our projects, so basically there are three themes to the projects: wildlife ecology, wildlife management, and environmental policy. They present the various sub projects that we will be doing to us and then we submit our choice of professor.
This process ended up being very frustrating because I originally was assigned to do environmental policy work, where the field work involves interviews of local people only. I had no issues with the professor, his particular projects, or policy itself, as I have come to appreciate this field so much more while being here. However, that being said I want to make a career out of wildlife conservation doing tough and intensive field research, and much of the reason I came here was to gain research experience I do not have yet and test out of this is really what I want to do. I also am going to extend some of my work and turn it into an honors thesis at Westfield State. Meanwhile, I found that other students with tons of research experience were getting first choice. I was able to advocate for myself and was very happy to be switched into the wildlife management group.
Once in our groups we decided amongst ourselves who was going to do what project. I was able to get my first choice, which I was very excited about. So I have mentioned Lake Manyara National Park a few times in my posts. It is the park located 25 minutes down the road and it is where we studied baboons and had our first game drive. Basically there has been sporadic population data since 1959 for 13 different herbivore species in the park. Thus, my professor wrote a paper analyzing these population trends and looking at historical events that could explain some of the trend outcomes. Unfortunately, the paper was rejected by journals with the opportunity to revise…so that was my job…revise. I needed to reanalyze the data and look at it in a slightly different way to make more concrete conclusions about the history of the populations in the park. This was a major challenge for me because there was not a lot of time for me to learn many of the complicated statistics behind what I had to do and learn new programs that I have not used before to do my project. However, I welcomed the challenge and I was very excited about my project since it is it is one of the first studies in Africa that looks at the trends of so many species over the entire history of a protected area. Once I finish my work I will make a post explaining everything more in detail and share my completed paper, so stay tuned! I am very hopeful that my work will make my professor’s paper now publishable and there is a possibility that I can be cited as an author, which would be absolutely amazing.
Anyways, since my project involves very little data collection, this means that I went out into the field for our 10 intensive field work days to help collect data for the other projects. This ended up working out so that I still could get the field experience I wanted. We all helped each other collect data, so this was not just me. For those that are interested to know, some of the other projects include various camera trap studies to determine herbivore and carnivore activity patterns and distribution in Lake Manyara National Park, look at species richness and other aspects of diversity in Yaeda Valley, and others are working to help my professor publish other papers on Manyara Ranch and the local Wildlife Management Areas. In environmental policy they are looking at local perceptions of climate change, challenges faced as a result of climate change, people’s mitigation methods, and the impact on local biodiversity. They are also looking at local perceptions of Wildlife Management Areas. The wildlife ecology kids are doing various studies on baboons, elephants, and road kill ecology.
Field Work in Yaeda Valley
For the first six days of field research my entire research group took a five-hour car ride to Yaeda Valley in northern Tanzania to camp and collect data. This easily turned into the most challenging, fun, and amazing experience of the entire trip. Tourists rarely hear of Yaeda Valley because it simply is not in the tourist circuit. There may be one tourism company nearby; however, foreign people rarely go there. I felt so incredibly lucky to get to experience a part of Tanzania that literally a handful of other people in the world have had the chance to see. For the first time I did not feel an ounce of being a tourist. So far this program has done a great job by taking us to all the tourist places but not letting our experience make us feel very much like tourists. However, you still feel it a little bit, but not in Yaeda Valley. Here we were welcomed and received as researchers, which was an awesome feeling.
Yaeda Valley is located around Lake Eyasi, located south of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. In particular we camped to the southeast area of the lake. The local area is mostly inhabited by the Datoga and Hadzabe tribes. The Datoga are pastoralists that live quite similarly to the Maasai, although they have their own unique cultural traditions. The Hadzabe people are what fascinated me the most. They are the last hunter-gatherer tribe in East Africa, and one of the few left in the world. They live together in the middle of the bush, hours away from the nearest developed settlement and are often isolated from roads. There settlements are rarely permanent and they will move easily if necessary. I know this because on my way to one of their settlements one day we drove our vehicle through a dried up river and got lost trying to find them. They hunt using only bows and arrows, which they make themselves out of natural materials in the bush. They often use poison from local plants to dip their arrows in for their hunts. There is only about 1,300 or so of them left and this tribe originated in Yaeda Valley and has been living there for their entire existence, which is unique to many of Tanzania’s tribes who mostly migrated from other parts of Africa. It is amazing to think that these people know this land like the back of their hand and have been passing down thousands of years worth of knowledge about this place. It is estimated that they have been here for 50,000 years. They also have a click language, meaning that certain letters or syllables are replaced with a clicking sound. I was able to hear bits and pieces of this amazing language, but you do have to listen closely because oftentimes the clicks are not obvious.
So how does the Hadzabe think they came into existence? Basically, they believe that their god sent a bunch of baboons out one day, some to fetch water and others for food. The baboons fetching food returned quickly, but the ones fetching water ended up playing in the river instead. Their god, now angry, made the food baboons the “Hadzabe” who would live in the bush and eat fruits and meat, where the water fetching baboons were forced to stay baboons and forever run in fear from the now meat eating Hadzabe. Kind of a funny story huh?
Anyways, upon arriving at our destination, in the middle of nowhere, I quickly realized that we would be roughing it in comparison to our other expedition, which were honestly pretty cushy. We pulled up to the local ranger station, which had some empty cemented rooms for sleeping and a couple cemented squatty potties for toilets. We brought our tents with us so we had to set up a makeshift campsite in between all the trees and shrubs. I decided it would be a great idea to really embrace the whole experience and use a big rock to hammer the tent stakes into the ground instead of just waiting patiently for the actual hammer. So I guess I got what I deserved because I ended up with two massive blisters on my right hand for the rest of the trip. Meanwhile, while setting up camp our dorky professor was having a grand old time with his machete chopping down twigs that he claimed was for the sake of “safety precautions” but we all just knew he was looking for an excuse to play with his machete. The rest of the day was spent settling into our temporary home, quite literally in the middle of the bush, and getting to know our guides for the next few days. They were a combination of official rangers for the area and also some local Hadzabe men, all people with remarkable capabilities of navigating and identifying all signs of nature in the Tanzanian bush.
The second day was the first of five long days of walking transects. Our research method for estimating species density and richness was establishing walking transects and using similar distance sampling methods that we used for the animal counts in the various protected areas. We would stop, identify, and record all tracks, feces, and actual animal sightings along the transects and then record the perpendicular distance from the transect to the wildlife sign to import into Distance 6.0 software later on. We are technically the second group of students to do research in Yaeda Valley as the previous fall semester group did the same study, so we repeated their transects to expand the data set for the valley. Each and every morning was an early wake up of 6 AM, breakfast at 6:30, and a start at 7. The earlier we started the cooler it was for walking, so this was ideal.
The first day of transects went not so according to plan. We each split up into groups of two students with a guide and various groups were assigned to various habitat areas in the valley on different days. The first day I was in the woodlands. I did not know what to expect, so I guess I should have figured that there would be no actual walking paths for our transects. A car would literally drop us off near our start point and we were forced to rely on the directions of the GPS and trust our guides to get us to each transect. Meanwhile, we were literally going to be walking through the middle of nowhere, with few signs of other people, constantly ducking or crawling through a dense thicket of bush. I might add that probably every single plant in the valley feels the needs to grow thorns of every shape and size. One of the guides had a gun and the rest of the Hadzabe had their bows and arrows. I was skeptical at first, but then I decided that if I were going to be in danger in the middle of the African bush, I would probably want a Hadzabe tribesmen nearby.
Anyways, we weren’t able to figure out the little tricks to our GPS so my partner and I ended up wandering the bush for a lot longer than we anticipated….a total of 18 km actually. We were supposed to only do five transects, 2 km long each, and separated by 500 meters in between. However, our wanderings managed to add about 8 km to our day. We started around 7:30/8:00 and didn’t end until about 4:00 that afternoon. Needless to say we were horribly dehydrated as we are limited to the water we can pack in our backpacks. I had two water bottles and a third disposable plastic bottle filled with water, but it was not nearly enough to combat the incredibly hot sun 3 degrees south of the equator. I also acquired a quite painful sunburn on my shoulders and neck that would be a source of pain for me for the next few days because I naively thought that I didn’t need to reapply sunscreen. Our guide was definitely not very happy with us for our confusion, as he brought far less water with him and an apparent tobacco addition kept him thirsty from smoking throughout the day. The one time we did come across another person, he actually purchased some from him. I should also probably mention that our guides spoke little to no English, so communicating in times of confusion was quite difficult. The good news is that this ended up being the longest of days for me and we figured out the GPS tricks later on. I should probably also mention that we are given radios so that we can communicate with other groups, our professor, and our student affairs manager who came with us, in cases of emergencies and to let people know when we are done and can get picked up. Once we finish transects we get to relax the rest of the day at camp, so it was really only half a day of hard work with adequate rest time. Fieldwork really isn’t so bad! Although, it is exhausting as I was passed out by 8:30 every night that week.
During that long day of walking, I was able to have some really great conversations with my partner. Something she said really hit home with me. She made the point that we Americans consider ourselves the privileged ones and people living in countries like Tanzania are the “under-privileged” people. And yes, in many ways these people have access to far less material things and are also limited in many other ways as well. However, in many regards, we are the ones that are under-privileged, not them. She was so right. In terms of concrete sets of morals, sense of duties and obligations, respect for and the caring of others, and overall feelings of being content and happy…we are the inferior people to Tanzanians. So yeah, I guess if we define privilege by how long our list is of what we have, then yeah, we win, but we are the ones who haven’t figured out how to put selfishness aside, embrace what we have, and find a love for the lives we are given. I think we all need to stop and think how we define our quality of life. Is it by how cushy our lives are, or how good and pure your soul is? From now on, I will define mine by the latter.
The next day was the most dreaded day for all of us, not because walking transects are so bad because it was…..election day. Our SAM (student affairs manager), Becky, was able to get enough internet on her phone to update us that Trump was in the lead before leaving that morning. I would like to add that I did submit an absentee ballot, although I have no confirmation that it actually made it to my hometown and that the paperwork was correct, so fingers crossed that it did make it. I guess I can say that I voted for my first presidential election from Africa!
Anyways, I was able to go with different students every day. That day my habitat was in the plains so we basically walked in a straight line for 12 km with absolutely nothing blocking our view. They basically let us out of the car and said: “See those mountains over there? Keep walking towards them until you hit the road.” So we did. Although these transects were a pain in the ass because we had to count hundreds of cows, donkeys, and shoats. Yes…shoats. From a distance it is really difficult to distinguish between goats and sheep so we lump them together as shoats. It actually is a fairly acceptable word around here and not just an SFS joke. However, during this trip we decided to put a spin on the word and replace curse words with shoat. For example….shoat show, mother of shoat, and just plain own shoat were thrown around a lot. Our professor even started adopting it by the end. And while I am speaking of shoats, they really enjoyed hanging around our campsite. One of the afternoons after we were all back from walking we watched a goat walk right up to my tent and proceed to try and jump on it and immediately fall off. It was quite the shoat show watching a shoat be a shoat.
The transects on the second day were probably the hottest because there was nothing to cover us from the sun even a little bit. At some points there wasn’t even grass, and the landscape was entirely barren, the earth cracked from being so dry, and only a couple of the smallest, most shriveled up shrubs. While walking, I almost mistook two baby birds as blowing balls of grass. I almost stepped on them too, as they literally walked over my feet, but thankfully I didn’t. It turned out to be two baby chestnut bellied sand grouse chicks, and boy were they cute. They were so cute that our guide was walking around with his phone trying to take pictures of them. Shortly after walking a little ways farther, our guide turns around to us, points behind us, and proceeds to turn around keep walking. Meanwhile, the two of us turn around to see a massive wave of dust flying at us so we screamed, stood in place, and closed our eyes until we could no longer feel the dust particles hitting our faces. Apparently, this whole event had no effect on our guide because he just left us freaking out and kept walking on through it like it was nothing.
After a while, we were radioed the results of the election. If you told me that I was about to find out the next president of the United States from out in the middle of the Tanzanian bush with a radio, I would not have believed you. Because I am sure there is quite a range of opinions on this topic by my readers, I will not go too much into detail about how I felt about Trump winning. I will start by saying nothing about the election made me particularly happy, but let’s just say that hearing the news of Trump’s victory while walking around looking at animal poop on the ground seemed…..fitting. Every single one of us at camp were in low spirits that afternoon and unhappy with the news from back home. I couldn’t help but look around me and fear what may come of the environment in the next four years. I can only hope that some good is done for it and Trump doesn’t make decisions that will further destroy it. What I found to be most interesting is that a lot of Tanzanians are Trump supporters, including one of my Tanzanian professors who was thrilled with the results. The only explanation that I could think of for this is that the media sources in Tanzania give a very different perspective of the campaign that we saw in America. But that is all I will say about the election. I will just add that I was very happy to be removed from the campaign for the last few months. We ended the second day much earlier than the first so I was able to enjoy a nice nap under a tree in one of the few shady spots at camp. I was also very happy to give my feet a much needed break after the last two days generated some rather large blisters all over my feet.
The next day I was lucky enough to take a day off of walking, as almost all of us did, and went with some of the environmental policy students. The professor and a handful of students from the environmental policy research group came with us so that they could conduct interviews on local climate change and bush meat hunting with the Hadzabe and Datoga tribes. This was the day that we spent two hours driving through dried riverbeds in the middle of nowhere and got lost. When we arrived at the nearest settlement I was surprised to find that their homes were basically piles of dried grasses close to the ground. Their settlement is so remote that most of the world would have not a clue that they are there, which is a concept that is so foreign to me. Back home, just about everywhere is accessible and its location documented. I never stopped to think how there are people out that live in such isolation who rely only on the immediate resources around them.
This was the day that I felt the most culture shock of the entire semester. I have certainly experienced culture shock throughout the semester, but what I witnessed that day was the most startlingly different from anything I had ever imagined. I didn’t end up conducting the interviews, but I was able to sit and listen, which allowed me to take in so much more of what was around me. During the first interview we sat on the ground under a tree while two Hadza men answered the interview questions. I couldn’t help but notice their body odor, rotting teeth, and dry cracked skin. Their clothes were second hand clothes like the ones most Tanzanians wear; however you could tell that they had few garments and they were seldom replaced as they were covered in dirt and torn all over. I remember thinking to myself: “Could I ever live like these people do?” and honestly, I don’t think I could do it. I have grown up with a way of life that has been wonderful, but it has also made me less adaptable and more dependent on luxuries. It made the Maasai and Iraqw tribes seem like they live in luxury in comparison, where only a month before I found their way of life to be difficult to adjust to.
It was devastating to hear about the struggles of the Hadzabe people. They are a people with one of the most sustainable lifestyles in the world. In their entire history as a people they have never suffered from famine because they never depended on crops. They never take from nature more than it can produce. If you really think about it, these people have not removed themselves from nature’s circle of life. The rest of us in the world have managed to remove ourselves, deciding that what the earth provides for us is all ours for the taking. We forget that we share this world with thousands of other species and that because we are humans, we feel we can take all that we want from the land because after all we are superior aren’t we? And of course, most of us do this with the naïve thought in our heads that mother nature will always replenish herself in quantities that would allow for all of us to take more than our fair share. Meanwhile, the Hadzabe never take more from nature than what can be sustained and they respect all of the species for what they provide for them. It really is a beautiful thing.
Except here is the tragedy of this whole thing: modernization threatens the continued existence of this people. The expansion of settlements by other local tribes in the valley has resulted in large sums of deforested land and other land use changes for providing grazing lands for livestock. Since the Hadzabe do not participate in the formal political system and have land tenure laws, they don’t have a say when local village leaders grant land to people. Also with the expansion of settlements comes with an increase in bush meat hunting, which directly impacts the Hadzabe’s food source. Increased pressures due to climate change also more drastically impact the land they live off of. Thus, they are running out of all their resources. In recent years there have been efforts to set aside conserved land in the valley for the Hadzabe, but their way of life is still being threatened, as much of the conserved land is not regulated as much as it should be. It will be not too long before East Africa no longer has any hunter gatherer tribes and they are yet another people that will enter into the melting pot of modern aged people. It would be a tragedy to see such a beautiful and unique culture to perish in the face of modernization. The Hadzabe vocalized to us how this is a very big fear of theirs and leaving behind their way of life is the last thing they want to do.
After our first stop we made our way to a second Hadzabe settlement. Here we sat under a tree with one of the middle-aged men. I found it funny that he had second hand superman watch on. Around him were about ten children all under the age of four. I noticed that at both settlements there were a disproportionate amount of rather young children. Almost all of them of course weren’t wearing any clothes and only dressed in various beads around their wrists or around their bellies. While looking at the little faces next to the man being interviewed I couldn’t help but feel sad. All of their faces were caked in dirt, their noses runny with all the dirt just in their noses. Many of them had bloated bellies and had such a horrible cough that would make any parent of a young child in America cringe. I watched as they rubbed their hands on the ground and put sticks in their mouth. One of the youngest kids was curled up in the man’s lap and I worried that he was sick because he had the worst cough of them all and was very lethargic. Meanwhile, a few of the other adults gradually came to sit around and I noticed that many of them had the same cough as the kids. As I mentioned earlier our guide smoking tobacco on the first day, I witnessed smoking at both of the settlements we went to, and I wondered if this is the source of the cough in the adults. However, I was surprised to see at both settlements some remarkably old women, who I never would have expected to be thriving at such an old age in this sort of environment. They participated in the smoking too. During the interview I watched as one of these old women walked by with her back bent as if it were about to break under the weight of a large pile of firewood she was carrying as she held herself up with a makeshift cane. At another point in the interview another young boy probably around ten years old came walking up with a bloody dove that he had just freshly killed and tossed it to one of the women sitting next to us. I could see the fresh blood on the tip of the arrow. I had even seen kids younger than this boy outfitted with appropriately sized bows. This whole experience felt so surreal.
Our last stop was at another settlement. Here it began to rain and I stood outside to enjoy the break from the hot, dry air. I watched as a group of little kids who were excited about the rain would run from dirt pile to dirt pile and hurl their bodies into them. They were racing each other around, doing summersaults, and looked just about happier than any other humans I have ever come across. I watched them thinking to myself how these kids are so blissfully happy. They were living completely in the moment and not aware of the hardships they will face in life as they age. I realized why I was so fascinated by their sheer happiness, and that is because it is rare I see this kind of pure joy in children in America. There are far more tears and tantrums because of what we are told we can’t have. Meanwhile, these kids were blissfully unaware of all of the things other children have around the world, but those piles of dirt provided just as much, if not more joy than some fancy gadget that kids back home have. I think at home we need to start re-encouraging the value of an imagination versus the value of a toy. Now those kids I watched will grow up to be stronger individuals, more adaptable to hardships, and can bear larger burdens because they are very aware of what they do have and not what they don’t but want.
The next day was the most challenging of transects for me. Mostly because I felt pretty gross from not showering for five days and my body was tired. These transects were much more up and downhill over a rocky escarpment that provided my first view of Lake Eyasi. This meant crawling up, down, and around large rocks while navigating transects with the GPS. Besides all the rock climbing I was getting rather sick and tired of ducking under thorny shrubs every ten seconds and getting caught in them 75% of the time. I can’t tell you how many times my hat got taken right off my head by the thorns. Also, as the day went on and I couldn’t keep my mouth from feeling dry, I thought about how local people walk for miles in this heat just to get water, most likely not having any on the way. I certainly never appreciated water…or rehydration salts for that matter….as much ad I did on this expedition. However, overall, it really wasn’t so bad and a reasonable day of work, but this was the first time where I started to feel frustrated. The exciting part of our day was seeing cheetah tracks where we were. I found it odd that I never thought of associating such an iconic conservation species with being found outside a protected area. It is actually amazing how many species are in Yaeda Valley from eland to greater and lesser kudu to cheetah. Another highlight was also seeing spotted hyena feces. Yupp, you know it’s sad when a highlight of your day is seeing a pile of poop that is slightly more exciting than all the other piles of poop you spent your day looking at. In my defense, spotted hyena feces is white because they have such high concentrations of HCl in their stomachs that they are able to digest bones, so their feces excretes a lot of the calcium. I guess when I decided I wanted to study abroad in Africa I didn’t exactly picture that two of my newly acquired life skills were going to be able to identify crap tons (pun intended) of African mammal poop and also be able to look at a baboon’s genitals and tell you if it has an STD or not. Clearly this was what was missing from my conventional college education.
After we finished our transects we had a little while to wait for the other groups to finish. To pass the time, our guide taught us how to shoot the bow and arrows. So I guess I can say that a Hadzabe tribesman taught me how to shoot the first arrow I have ever shot with his own bow. Of course I was quite mediocre at it. In the meantime he showed off to us by pointing to tiny objects on the ground that were far away and with minimal effort, nailing them every time. I also got to try the fruit of a Baobab tree, which I found to be quite good. The fruit is found inside a little pod and its not fleshy like most fruits. Instead, you can pick out little dried chunks of it and then you suck on it until it loses flavor. After we gathered the troops we set off for the two hour drive back to camp (still in Yaeda Valley). We made a quick stop at one of our guide’s settlements where many of us proceeded to rather clumsily climb a large tree while the Hadzabe laughed at us.
On the way back to camp we stopped while one of the rangers went to go scope out some sketchy activity. We sat in the car excitedly anticipating hearing what happened. We were told it may be poachers and that a bust was about to take place. Meanwhile a very drunk man wandered around our car until he flopped over in the dust nearby. We were disappointed by the lack of excitement as it turned out to be a false alarm, but we were certainly glad that they weren’t poachers. As we continued driving and the sun began to set I couldn’t help but think how lucky I was to be in this incredibly isolated place with the experience I just gained. Yaeda valley is truly a beautiful place. As I was enjoying this view I watched as from a shrubby area a group of Hadzabe hunters emerged seemingly out of nowhere with their bows and arrows. I could tell they were beginning their hunt for the night. This whole moment was very surreal for me.
That night was officially our last. We ate dinner together with everyone and all of our guides. A few conservation and village leaders also joined us for the evening. The ward counselor promised us to try and conserve the natural resources of the valley, as well as thanked us for our research. They told us we are always welcome to the valley and that they hoped we could stay, but at the very least return again next years. I imagine SFS will continue their directed research there. What I found to be hilarious was that the Hadzabe told us how shocked they were that “wazungu” (white foreigners) women could possibly do the work we did. Of our entire research group doing transects, we only had one guy. Through most of the days we took very short and very few breaks. Oftentimes it would be the guide that would want to stop and not us. They were mind blown by the fact that we could walk for so long in the bush under the hot sun. This was a pretty cool feeling to have some of the most badass people in the world validate what women are actually capable of. After this exchange the Hadzabe performed a rather hilarious song and dance for us as a fun way to celebrate the end of research. They even made a bunch of bow and arrows that are the same as the ones they use to hunt with for us to buy. With very limited tourism opportunities the Hadzabe are able to make small sums of income that I imagine pay for the second hand clothes they get and other minor modern day amenities. I am very excited to hang up my bow and arrow once I am home.
The last thing I did that last night was one of the most fun moments of the entire semester for me. Somebody at camp introduced this game to us called star tripping. The game involves you folding your arms across your chest and looking at either a really bright star or the moon on a dark night. A group of people around you will spin you around really fast and then at the very second they stop spinning you they shine a bright light in your face. If you do it right and don’t ever lose contact with the star or moon then the bright light makes you lose all sense of gravity and control of your body so you collapse to the ground. This may sound weird and ridiculous but it was so much fun.
The next day we set back for camp after a long week of walking. I have never been so ready for a shower after not having access to one the entire time. It was the longest I had ever gone without a shower and it was quite uncomfortable at times but I did survive and it was a good lesson for me to learn. However, before we could leave that morning we had a couple more transects to finish. During our transects we came across lots of local deforestation. I was able to witness first hand what the Hadzabe are facing in the degradation of the natural resources of the valley. People were chopping down trees mainly to produce mass sums of charcoal. The worst part was we came across three sets of people illegally cutting down the trees, which our two guides who were rangers angrily reprimanded them. It was slightly scary the first time this happened because one of our guides had a gun and the other pulled out his handcuffs. My partner and I were convinced we would be walking the rest of the morning with a couple of prisoners. Thankfully that did not happen but I was certainly saddened to witness the degradation. Overall Yaeda Valley turned into one of the best and most rewarding experiences of the program.
Fieldwork in Lake Manyara National Park & Manyara Ranch
After Yaeda Valley we had one day to recuperate and then we had four more days of fieldwork to finish. We had breakfast at 6 AM everyday and we spent the first two days in Manyara Ranch. During my expedition to Tarangire I spent a day here doing animal counts. To remind you, Manyara Ranch is a unique protected area in Tanzania that is different than all the other kinds. There are no settlements allowed in the ranch. However, Maasai are allowed to bring their cattle into the ranch to graze in co existence with the wildlife. To assist in the project of two other people in our group, we conducted animal counts for two days straight, leaving camp at 6:30 AM and returning just before dinner around 6:30 PM. The first day a small group of us had to sit under a tree doing data entry while our professor conducted an aerial survey. The person piloting the plane was actually the head of the NGO called Honeyguide that does a lot of anti-poaching and human-wildlife conflict work, so we got to meet him. The first day it ended up pouring rain on us for a while so it turned into a tiring, cold, and wet day. However, we did get some awesome sightings of eland and lesser kudu that I wasn’t able to get all semester. The second day of animal counts in Manyara Ranch I ended up staying back because for my project there was a lot of relevant animal count surveys that needed to be entered into excel. This turned into a nice little break because I was certainly feeling the exhaustion from the fieldwork schedule.
The last two days we were in Lake Manyara National Park. Here we attempted standard line transect surveys like we have been doing all animal counts all semester. We also conducted sight-mark-resight counts for elephant and buffalo and total counts for wildebeest, giraffe, and zebra. Sight-mark-resight involved uniquely identifying herds of both species on the first day and then trying to find the same herds again using the unique identifiers we established, while also making note of new ones. We used this data to make sure that our transect surveys were not giving inaccurate estimates and that we could correct if we needed to. This information I did need for my project.
I assisted both days with the buffalo sight-mark-resight and the total counts. The best part of all of this is that this fieldwork we were doing was more or less a game drive. This made me realize that this is the type of stuff I want to be doing in my future. During these two days we were lucky enough to see a male lion. They are really hard to find in this park and there are not many of them left. Our program director who has researched lions in the crater as well as heads the lion project in Tarangire is just starting a study in Lake Manyara. This last month they just put a few collars on a couple of them. This particular male we saw was not one of the collared ones. However, we were concerned because his lower lips and gums were swollen black so large that he could barely close his mouth. I took pictures and showed the director who let the park’s wildlife vet know about the lion. They believe it is just a symptom of old age, but they are keeping an eye out in case it requires attention in the future.
Lake Manyara holds a special place in my heart as it is where I had my first game drive ever as well as where we had our first field exercise with baboons. Of course the first thing we came across everyday pulling into the park was a troop of baboons in the road. On the first day I certainly did not gain an appreciation for these animals. However, not spending some quality time with them in a while made me realize that I needed them back I my life. This sounds sort of like a warped romance novel I am aware. First of all, you know there’s a baboon troop around before you see them because you always smell them first. They smell terrible by the way, and nothing smells worse than a baboon troop after it rains. Nothing like a bunch of stinky wet monkeys to make your game drive exciting right? Anyways, I’ve learned a few things about baboons. Picture a time when you were watching something and it was so horrid and gross that you couldn’t bring yourself to look away no matter how much you wanted to. That’s what watching baboons is like. Also, I realized that much of the baboons typical behavior is not so shocking to me because I happened to grow up with two of them. Anyways, I also learned that they are incredibly fascinating to watch and I really enjoy watching their behavior. Although, I have witnessed many highly revolting acts performed by the baboons. Some things cannot be unseen.
Both days we ended up at the hippo pool, where you guessed it, there are hippos. The park has a wonderful sign that says “magical living sponge” so is it referring to the hippos or the swamp? We don’t know. I am assuming hippos. While spending time with the magical living sponges we were able to witness the magnificent nighttime-daytime bird. Honestly I have no idea what the species is actually called. However, if you watched the BBC video on youtube, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Anyways, for the most part this wrapped up directed research fieldwork.
Data Analysis & Write-Up
Of course without a break we dove right into data analysis and write up. This was the most frustrating and exhausting part of the process. By this point I was very tired. I would wake up and take almost no breaks, working on my project from 8 AM- 10 PM. I had a frustratingly slow start, where this software called Distance was causing me all sorts of problems. Once I got past this hump I had lots more work ahead of me. I had lots of trends to produce and had lots of estimations that I had to fix to make the trends accurate. I often had to go back and repeat work I had already done more than I would have liked in order to fix minor errors. Also, my exhaustion through the process didn’t help my ability to detect and minimize errors. It was a very big challenge to learn both Distance and R software and perform complicated processes with it. It was especially difficult to do all of this in a matter of 5 days. However, as challenging as all of this was and as frustrating as it was at times, I really enjoyed the challenge and walked away with so much experience in research.
Once data analysis was finally finished we went into write up. This was rather rushed for me because data analysis did take so long. I was forced to take a free day and stay back at camp in order to finish my draft while everyone else from camp went to a lodge for the day. However, after a long and tedious process I finally finished and produced a manuscript that I am really proud of. My professor plans to use some of my manuscript and add it to his previous manuscript. Ideally his study will now be accepted for publishing and I will be added as an author. Due to this fact I will not be posting a copy of my manuscript on my blog. However, if you would like to read it I would be happy to send you a copy. Just email me at helenarheault@gmail.com . For this reason I won’t share the results of my findings on here.
During this period of write up I got to spend one day going on a waterfall hike in Mto wa Mbu. We basically crawled straight up the waterfall crawling our way up the rocks. The cool part was that the waterfall brought us up the rift wall a ways. Another morning we did a sunrise hike to the top of Moyo Hill. I had done this hike before, but apparently I felt that I needed to do it again at sunrise when I was already exhausted. Unfortunately it was too cloudy to get a nice view of the sunrise. However, we did get to see Mount Kilimanjaro far in the distance. I was so excited that I finally got to lay my eyes on this famous mountain, right from the village I was living in that is hours and hours away from it no less. I was going to be sad if I had to leave Tanzania without getting to see the mountain that gives Tanzania much of it name.
Community Presentations
The final component of directed research is community presentations. This is a day where we invite local stakeholders meaning local villagers, village leaders, and other management from the various areas we study. They came to our camp and we presented our work to them in groups. I presented with other students who did work on long-term wildlife population trends in different areas in the Tarangire-Manyara ecosystem, which we have been living in. This presentation process was very frustrating for me as our director asked me not to make claims relevant to the major findings of my study because of sensitivities to the community about human effects such as poaching. He also didn’t see the validity in my results even though he never took the time to read the full extent of my study. All of this did not sink well with me as I felt I was not fulfilling my ethical duty as a researcher to report all of the results. This made the presentations less meaningful for me. However, that being said it was a cool experience to witness how the local people here in Tanzania listen to our findings and bring it back to their communities. Another cool aspect of the presentation was that we had a translator throughout the whole thing.
Well, I guess that’s a wrap. It is currently my last night here at Moyo Hill and it is 2 in the morning so forgive me for the many spelling mistakes I likely made in this post. Directed research turned into an amazing experience on top of the rest of the amazing experiences I have had here. I got As in all my classes here, but I gained so much more than that. I am leaving here feeling content. I feel that I got everything that I came here for and more, but I am excited to see friends and family back home. There are a few posts about other things I have done here that I haven’t had the time to write since I have been so busy. I will most likely be posting them all within a few days of returning to the states. I also plan on writing a final reflection post about my whole experience here, as well as writing about my experiences with reverse culture shock a few weeks after being home. In the meantime, thank you to all my readers who followed me on my journey here and stay tuned for a few more posts!
